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This is going to get downvoted into oblivion but I honestly believe it's the truth. People are going to cling to their cars until they have a viable substitute

This is going to get downvoted into oblivion but I honestly believe it's the truth. People are going to cling to their cars until they have a viable substitute that offers all of the following: 1. Psychological safety - that they wont be robbed or assaulted, wont have to encounter people they dont want to, wont be uncomfortable temperature wise, wont be late due to unreliable operation (including the apathy of unionized workers), wont have to smell things they dont want to smell 2. Similar experience to cars - Get them within 1/4 mile of their destination (~5 minute walk). Anything more means adapting fashion to the elements. 3. Does not have seasonal variability in usability - The bus in Calgary, AB is amazing in the winter, and sucks in the winter (waiting for a late bus in the cold means you have to dress for 40 minutes in -20c weather, when it might only be 2. And then you're inside a 20C bus with far too much clothes on. And it's hard to end up at work presentable. This is probably far less important now with rise of remote work for many. 4. Is not a tax line item that is absurdly expensive per user mile. Right now a lot of public transit is under utilized meaning it's actual price per user mile is very high. I get that it's a chicken / egg challenge. How do you get people to use a sparse system unless you build out a full suite of routes. How do you build a full suite of routes without having them be underutilized, at least at first? 5. Works 24/7 for their needs. 6. Works well for families. Getting groceries with 2 kids, going to urgent care acceptably fast, pickup and drop off at 2 different schools (elementary / middle for example). All sorts of patterns that work with 1 parent and 2 kids each having a diff destination. Ultimately I think with autonomous cars the whole landscape will change rapidly if the gov't & unions allow it. Parking isn't an issue if my car goes home to my garage during the day (or can park itself within an inch of the next car because no one is getting in/out and the cars can coordinate to unblock each other in a truly packed parking garage). Even more so if the autonomous car is not mine and it simply goes to pickup another rider. Now we have controlled environment for just me and the car can be a small 2 seater like a smart car.

c22 4y ago
Okay, but now the shared autonomous car that comes to pick you up has someone else's trash and vomit in it and we're back at point 1.
- skybrian 4y ago
  A car can drive itself but can’t tell whether its insides need cleaning or not? This seems fixable.
  - DennisP 4y ago
    Doesn't even need to be a privacy issue, just take still photos after the ride.
    - runnerup 4y ago
      There is a 0% chance that on-demand autonomous vehicles will not record their passengers. That would only be offered on negotiated business/executive contracts.
      - maerF0x0 4y ago
        To me the real question is what is the % chance they wont be selling that feed + plastering the interior with advertising opportunities. The public transit I've used is usually plastered with ads too.
- DennisP 4y ago
  So let users reject a ride that arrives with excessive mess. That car goes to a cleaning facility and you wait for another one. If the car was in fact messy, the previous user takes a reputation hit and may eventually get charged more, if it happens enough to have high confidence they're really at fault. This gives an extra incentive for users to go ahead and report, if there's a problem. On the other hand if the car was fine, then a separate reputation score starts to lower the weight on the rejecting user, eventually just keeping their rejects in service instead of sending them for cleaning. It's up to the ridesharing service to decide what they consider "fine," probably something along the lines of "X% of users wouldn't report this."
hisnameisjimmy 4y ago
Your first point seems to be something that our local leaders still are not taking seriously enough. If I have to listen to or read warnings all around me to "keep my eyes up and my phone down", I am not going to get a strong vibe of "I am safe and this is a nice time I am having". I would add to #2, "Get them within a 5 minute walk without it taking twice as long". I am ok if public transit takes me up to 50% longer. But many trips are 1.5 to 2x as long when including transfers, and it's not cheap! Sometimes I have to pay multiple transit agencies to get to where I want to go.
- mcv 4y ago
  > If I have to listen to or read warnings all around me to "keep my eyes up and my phone down", I am not going to get a strong vibe of "I am safe and this is a nice time I am having". Exactly why I prefer public transport over cars. Driving is just lost time to me.
  - dendrite9 4y ago
    I see plenty of people on their phones while driving too, it doesn't seem to stop them. I also do it occasionally, though I try to do better and just use it to check traffic maps while stopped at a light.
- chimeracoder 4y ago
  > Your first point seems to be something that our local leaders still are not taking seriously enough. If I have to listen to or read warnings all around me to "keep my eyes up and my phone down", I am not going to get a strong vibe of "I am safe and this is a nice time I am having". This is a difference between perception and objective reality. Public officials began this campaign of "educating" people about the "dangers" of public transit years ago, coincidentally right when crime was at its all-time historical low. The perception that the subway is unsafe was not actually grounded in any objective facts, but rather a response to the feedback loop generated between the media and public officials.
martinald 4y ago
The thing is Uber et al has changed the dynamics of all this. You now don't have to have a car and JUST use public transit. You can use public transit for some journeys where it makes sense and uber for the rest. This works well if many of your trips are walkable (coffee shop some groceries, restaurants etc). This would have been very difficult before Uber-like services, as taxis were too slow & unreliable in my experience (London minicabs were pretty atrocious at giving you reasonable time estimates). This absolutely doesn't work in very suburban/exurban areas; but it really opens it up past very dense city environments where you don't need a car imo.
- maerF0x0 4y ago
  I do agree here. I did not own a car for many years living in San Francisco. Rented a car when it mattered. But honestly it also prevented me from doing a lot just from marginal barrier. If my car had been sitting in the garage downstairs fueled up and ready to go I probably would have gone hiking a lot more. Visited the peninsula more often etc. Instead I did stuff in walking distance most of the time. It eventually lead me to leaving San Francisco because my view of it was the 1-2 mile radius around civic center which essentially is all homelessness, poop, and danger. Just an anecdote, and ultimately felt it was much better to live on the peninsula during lockdowns than to be "car free" and without options in the city.
HideousKojima 4y ago
I think #6 especially is important, I get a feeling that the median redditor who frequents /r/fuckcars doesn't have children, or has a single child at most. I've carried groceries just for myself on public transit before, and it wasn't very fun. Carrying groceries for 4+ people on public transit would be a nightmare. Also while I don't like crazed drug-addled hobos on the bus with me, I don't feel particularly afraid of them because I'm a male. If I also had to make sure they didn't accost my wife or children would be far less tolerable.
- snarf21 4y ago
  I think this is a problem best served by scheduled delivery. The CO2 footprint from shared delivery of groceries is quite low. Also, you save time by just picking them up at the curb or in the lobby. It is one of the few win-win for delivery. For meal pick-up it is mostly a wash because it is 1:1 too much. But for scheduled delivery, that math is changed. We need to think of some of these systems more like mail delivery and less like instant delivery on demand.
  - maerF0x0 4y ago
    But there's 100 micro losses to that choice. It's a pain to order few items (and delivery cost amortizes across more items, or is not free). At least my grocery, maybe most, charge more per item as a hidden fee You dont get to pick the produce/items and store employees do not give a shit. You have to remain home for a delivery window instead of start/stopping at exactly your choice of time . The hard thing is that every substitute has many tradeoffs and many people are already living their optimized choice of tradeoffs that they can determine for themselves without forcing others to make a suboptimal personal choice in sacrifice for distribute good A lot of social good choices look like "You sacrifice $1 so that 200 people can have a penny more" It's a tough sell because usually the people paying receive far less than they receive back from social good. Yes its "on average" beneficial, but not to the one who's account is being raided.
    - snarf21 4y ago
      I agree they are all choices and all have trade-offs. I was specifically speaking to the pain point of groceries on mass transit. You still have a "someone's else's schedule" problem on transit because when you want to go may not align with transit. I'd rather hang at home than on a platform with bags and bags of groceries. I'm with you on picking your battles. You have to decide where your pain points are and where your conveniences are.
nluken 4y ago
A good public transit system hits all of these marks. Hell, even a shitshow like the NYC subway ticks most or all of the boxes, and it's faster than taking a car too. Admittedly, it's not perfect on point 1, but it's still waaaay safer than driving. Americans grossly underestimate how dangerous driving is.
- falcolas 4y ago
  I went to NYC for work, and the transit system absolutely did not hit all the marks. I had to get to the Jacob Javits conference center, and ended up walking a couple of miles through just-shy-of-sketchy neighborhoods because the single bus was out of service. Every place I needed to go to was over 5m walk away. And point 1 - psychological safety? As far from it as possible. And frankly, 1.3 deaths per 100M miles driven is not that dangerous. 40k per year in a country of 300M is not a lot of folks. Obesity likely kills significantly more.
  - anthonypasq 4y ago
    i dont live in NYC so maybe im wrong but the hudson yards station is a 6 minute walk from javits center. Why were you taking a bus? the vast majority of people that live in NYC seem to do perfectly well without a car
    - falcolas 4y ago
      The time I was there, there was no subway connection within a mile of Javits. At least, not one that was open. I needed to connect from a subway to a bus to get there. > the vast majority of people that live in NYC seem to do perfectly well without a car Yes, you can work around a lot of public transport issues (and NY has many of those) by extending your walk. Which is unpleasant in many situations but absolutely possible. And yes, I wouldn't want to drive in NY either. I also knew a few folks who live in the NY suburbs who have a car as well, for when they need to do something other than commute to work in NY.
  - wombat-man 4y ago
    Ok well you could have taken a 7 train or one of the many trains that stop on 34th st or Times square and had a walk of less than a mile. The subway system is pretty good and I don't find a 5 minute walk to be that inconvenient. I am happy to not have to think about a car.
eli 4y ago
The point of the article is that the per-mile cost of cars is actually much higher than you think if you include the externalities. Autonomous cars that work as you describe are not anywhere close to being ready. And I don't think the math works if they're a replacement for mass transit.
- maerF0x0 4y ago
  Depending on how you do the accounting, some folks feel the cost of a _user mile_ is much higher in public transit, largely because of low utilization. Perennially people say it will get better as more use it, but It's a hard chicken/egg issue to only do the highest demand routes, but folks wont use it unless they can get their _entire_ needs covered.
  - eli 4y ago
    I'm not sure about that, but even if true: public transit can scale up to support a whole city using current technology. Driving can't.
    - maerF0x0 4y ago
      I suppose the current technology bit does restrict things massively. But I will say that there are a ton of options to optimized the current single occupant vehicle model. Self Driving can do a lot of things that increase the efficiency of roadways. Eg: If everyone's vehicle went to a fixed 10mph idle speed as soon as the light turned green we'd get far more vehicles through a light rather than cascading 1-2 second reaction times to the next vehicle's brake lights (and much more if the person is on their phone, which is increasingly common) . Eg2: Self driving cars could drive much closer to eachother, and actually pre-communicate intent to brake giving the effect of negative reaction time. (relative to humans)
mech987987 4y ago
for point #6, the fact that getting kids around town using public transportation is slow, expensive, and difficult makes me wonder if the anti-car people even have families in mind when they advocate for their alternative solutions. The downtown areas that are likely to be workable with no parking in the mid-sized cities I've lived in are already essentially "child-free zones". I think that childless people tend to self-select into the trendy downtown lifestyle, and are more inclined to imagine the world as a playground for young adults.
- HEmanZ 4y ago
  It’s really weird to me that Americans automatically assume that “soccer mom” suburban lifestyle is just the default way to raise kids. Like it’s normal for kids (children! without jobs!) to need to travel 20 miles per day for their daily activities. Go to any other civilized country and you’ll see children biking or walking to their daily activities, or riding public transport alone (ever heard of a school bus?) if they really need to.
  - maerF0x0 4y ago
    The reason it's hard to talk about in isolation and without assuming stereotype personas is because it's truly complex. Part of why Americans travel 20 miles per day is because highways make things "close" in terms of minutes, and because they take up so much space, large roadways can make proximal (distance) things further. Eg if you have to walk 1 mile down a highway to a pedestrian bridge to get to the part that is just across 8 lanes, a 1 minute walk becomes a 40 minute walk. Additionally these roadways rarely are kid safe for things like bicycles. Additionally social stratification and division has made it (seemingly?) less for those kids to travel alone. Additionally 100 other points. I really do think when people choose to drive they're expressing their best known solution to a wide variety of non transportation issues and because they choose it it feeds back on itself democratically and design wise (Design for cars because people choose cars, people choose cars because of the solutions to design for cars)
    - HEmanZ 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
throwaway22032 4y ago
Frankly I think the problem is more like this - 1. Get people to change their lifestyles to the downtown lifestyle in which you don't own a home, you don't do significant DIY / outdoor hobbies etc, you don't often leave a 10ish mile radius of your home except for holidays. Everything in the "fuck cars" movement seems to stem from that. I live in London and the public transport network works fantastically for the "metropolitan lifestyle". But that's not what I want to limit my life to. If push came to shove and I had to decide whether I wanted a house with a garden, kids, hobbies that require transporting relatively large items, etc, I'd sooner move out of the city than give that up. I love clubs, pubs, makerspaces and the high street as much as the next guy but it's pretty easy to just live out of town and get the train in for that.
- oldnetguy 4y ago
  I think it's even more than that. There is a movement where you should own nothing. You should not have a house, you should live in a city, everything should be shared and paid for with taxes. I was born in NYC and own my own apartment and I am considered a "Gentrifier" because I bought it and do not rent. I like living in a metropolitan area, but I can see why other's don't.
  - throwaway22032 4y ago
    Everything has to be done by someone else. You can't work on your own place, you have to employ someone to do that. Where do they live with their work van? I guess they have to be a business(tm) and rent a warehouse. Oh and their van has to be less than 5 years old, otherwise it's too pollutey. They can just buy a new one, that's fine. Etc etc. It'd be funny if it wasn't actually happening. I have had a pretty charmed life and I still find it really hard to understand the weirdly bookish attitude.
    - maerF0x0 4y ago
      > You can't work on your own place, you have to employ someone to do that Part of this is the taxation and GDP-ification of everything. (not saying go back) for example when we traded housewives for house cleaners + hello fresh + fiverr assistants we got a double whammy of GDP growth (+ for the wife going to work, plus for the employees now doing her previously unaccounted work at a profit). And same story with IRS receivables. (again, not saying send women back home, just pointing out the accounting)
OkayPhysicist 4y ago
I reckon 1) could be solved by price discrimination. I would happily pay twice as much for BART if it meant riding in a train car that was only occupied by other people willing to pay twice as much. By tiering service, you still provide transit at all for everybody who needs it at the current price, while meeting more of the demand of people who people who avoid public transit for perceived safety/classism concerns.
- OkayPhysicist 4y ago
  To expand on this, since it sounds kind of flippant: In the US at the moment, public transit suffers from the fact that in most areas, for most people it's largely optional: you can drive, or you can use public transit. Quite a few people choose to drive, leading to a disproportionate fraction of the people on public transit being people who have no other option, and furthermore the fraction of outright deranged individuals (leaving all their clothes on the platform save for a baseball cap and a syringe tucked behind their ear, for an example I witnessed a few days ago) being over-represented in the public transit riding populace. Overcoming this stigma is important for getting people to use public transit as their primary means of transportation, and working towards making truly car-optional cities.

c22 4y ago

Okay, but now the shared autonomous car that comes to pick you up has someone else's trash and vomit in it and we're back at point 1.

skybrian 4y ago
A car can drive itself but can’t tell whether its insides need cleaning or not? This seems fixable.
- DennisP 4y ago
  Doesn't even need to be a privacy issue, just take still photos after the ride.
  - runnerup 4y ago
    There is a 0% chance that on-demand autonomous vehicles will not record their passengers. That would only be offered on negotiated business/executive contracts.
    - maerF0x0 4y ago
      To me the real question is what is the % chance they wont be selling that feed + plastering the interior with advertising opportunities. The public transit I've used is usually plastered with ads too.
DennisP 4y ago
So let users reject a ride that arrives with excessive mess. That car goes to a cleaning facility and you wait for another one. If the car was in fact messy, the previous user takes a reputation hit and may eventually get charged more, if it happens enough to have high confidence they're really at fault. This gives an extra incentive for users to go ahead and report, if there's a problem. On the other hand if the car was fine, then a separate reputation score starts to lower the weight on the rejecting user, eventually just keeping their rejects in service instead of sending them for cleaning. It's up to the ridesharing service to decide what they consider "fine," probably something along the lines of "X% of users wouldn't report this."

hisnameisjimmy 4y ago

Your first point seems to be something that our local leaders still are not taking seriously enough. If I have to listen to or read warnings all around me to "keep my eyes up and my phone down", I am not going to get a strong vibe of "I am safe and this is a nice time I am having". I would add to #2, "Get them within a 5 minute walk without it taking twice as long". I am ok if public transit takes me up to 50% longer. But many trips are 1.5 to 2x as long when including transfers, and it's not cheap! Sometimes I have to pay multiple transit agencies to get to where I want to go.

mcv 4y ago
> If I have to listen to or read warnings all around me to "keep my eyes up and my phone down", I am not going to get a strong vibe of "I am safe and this is a nice time I am having". Exactly why I prefer public transport over cars. Driving is just lost time to me.
- dendrite9 4y ago
  I see plenty of people on their phones while driving too, it doesn't seem to stop them. I also do it occasionally, though I try to do better and just use it to check traffic maps while stopped at a light.
chimeracoder 4y ago
> Your first point seems to be something that our local leaders still are not taking seriously enough. If I have to listen to or read warnings all around me to "keep my eyes up and my phone down", I am not going to get a strong vibe of "I am safe and this is a nice time I am having". This is a difference between perception and objective reality. Public officials began this campaign of "educating" people about the "dangers" of public transit years ago, coincidentally right when crime was at its all-time historical low. The perception that the subway is unsafe was not actually grounded in any objective facts, but rather a response to the feedback loop generated between the media and public officials.

martinald 4y ago

The thing is Uber et al has changed the dynamics of all this. You now don't have to have a car and JUST use public transit. You can use public transit for some journeys where it makes sense and uber for the rest. This works well if many of your trips are walkable (coffee shop some groceries, restaurants etc). This would have been very difficult before Uber-like services, as taxis were too slow & unreliable in my experience (London minicabs were pretty atrocious at giving you reasonable time estimates). This absolutely doesn't work in very suburban/exurban areas; but it really opens it up past very dense city environments where you don't need a car imo.

maerF0x0 4y ago
I do agree here. I did not own a car for many years living in San Francisco. Rented a car when it mattered. But honestly it also prevented me from doing a lot just from marginal barrier. If my car had been sitting in the garage downstairs fueled up and ready to go I probably would have gone hiking a lot more. Visited the peninsula more often etc. Instead I did stuff in walking distance most of the time. It eventually lead me to leaving San Francisco because my view of it was the 1-2 mile radius around civic center which essentially is all homelessness, poop, and danger. Just an anecdote, and ultimately felt it was much better to live on the peninsula during lockdowns than to be "car free" and without options in the city.

HideousKojima 4y ago

I think #6 especially is important, I get a feeling that the median redditor who frequents /r/fuckcars doesn't have children, or has a single child at most. I've carried groceries just for myself on public transit before, and it wasn't very fun. Carrying groceries for 4+ people on public transit would be a nightmare. Also while I don't like crazed drug-addled hobos on the bus with me, I don't feel particularly afraid of them because I'm a male. If I also had to make sure they didn't accost my wife or children would be far less tolerable.

snarf21 4y ago
I think this is a problem best served by scheduled delivery. The CO2 footprint from shared delivery of groceries is quite low. Also, you save time by just picking them up at the curb or in the lobby. It is one of the few win-win for delivery. For meal pick-up it is mostly a wash because it is 1:1 too much. But for scheduled delivery, that math is changed. We need to think of some of these systems more like mail delivery and less like instant delivery on demand.
- maerF0x0 4y ago
  But there's 100 micro losses to that choice. It's a pain to order few items (and delivery cost amortizes across more items, or is not free). At least my grocery, maybe most, charge more per item as a hidden fee You dont get to pick the produce/items and store employees do not give a shit. You have to remain home for a delivery window instead of start/stopping at exactly your choice of time . The hard thing is that every substitute has many tradeoffs and many people are already living their optimized choice of tradeoffs that they can determine for themselves without forcing others to make a suboptimal personal choice in sacrifice for distribute good A lot of social good choices look like "You sacrifice $1 so that 200 people can have a penny more" It's a tough sell because usually the people paying receive far less than they receive back from social good. Yes its "on average" beneficial, but not to the one who's account is being raided.
  - snarf21 4y ago
    I agree they are all choices and all have trade-offs. I was specifically speaking to the pain point of groceries on mass transit. You still have a "someone's else's schedule" problem on transit because when you want to go may not align with transit. I'd rather hang at home than on a platform with bags and bags of groceries. I'm with you on picking your battles. You have to decide where your pain points are and where your conveniences are.

nluken 4y ago

A good public transit system hits all of these marks. Hell, even a shitshow like the NYC subway ticks most or all of the boxes, and it's faster than taking a car too. Admittedly, it's not perfect on point 1, but it's still waaaay safer than driving. Americans grossly underestimate how dangerous driving is.

falcolas 4y ago
I went to NYC for work, and the transit system absolutely did not hit all the marks. I had to get to the Jacob Javits conference center, and ended up walking a couple of miles through just-shy-of-sketchy neighborhoods because the single bus was out of service. Every place I needed to go to was over 5m walk away. And point 1 - psychological safety? As far from it as possible. And frankly, 1.3 deaths per 100M miles driven is not that dangerous. 40k per year in a country of 300M is not a lot of folks. Obesity likely kills significantly more.
- anthonypasq 4y ago
  i dont live in NYC so maybe im wrong but the hudson yards station is a 6 minute walk from javits center. Why were you taking a bus? the vast majority of people that live in NYC seem to do perfectly well without a car
  - falcolas 4y ago
    The time I was there, there was no subway connection within a mile of Javits. At least, not one that was open. I needed to connect from a subway to a bus to get there. > the vast majority of people that live in NYC seem to do perfectly well without a car Yes, you can work around a lot of public transport issues (and NY has many of those) by extending your walk. Which is unpleasant in many situations but absolutely possible. And yes, I wouldn't want to drive in NY either. I also knew a few folks who live in the NY suburbs who have a car as well, for when they need to do something other than commute to work in NY.
- wombat-man 4y ago
  Ok well you could have taken a 7 train or one of the many trains that stop on 34th st or Times square and had a walk of less than a mile. The subway system is pretty good and I don't find a 5 minute walk to be that inconvenient. I am happy to not have to think about a car.

eli 4y ago

The point of the article is that the per-mile cost of cars is actually much higher than you think if you include the externalities. Autonomous cars that work as you describe are not anywhere close to being ready. And I don't think the math works if they're a replacement for mass transit.

maerF0x0 4y ago
Depending on how you do the accounting, some folks feel the cost of a _user mile_ is much higher in public transit, largely because of low utilization. Perennially people say it will get better as more use it, but It's a hard chicken/egg issue to only do the highest demand routes, but folks wont use it unless they can get their _entire_ needs covered.
- eli 4y ago
  I'm not sure about that, but even if true: public transit can scale up to support a whole city using current technology. Driving can't.
  - maerF0x0 4y ago
    I suppose the current technology bit does restrict things massively. But I will say that there are a ton of options to optimized the current single occupant vehicle model. Self Driving can do a lot of things that increase the efficiency of roadways. Eg: If everyone's vehicle went to a fixed 10mph idle speed as soon as the light turned green we'd get far more vehicles through a light rather than cascading 1-2 second reaction times to the next vehicle's brake lights (and much more if the person is on their phone, which is increasingly common) . Eg2: Self driving cars could drive much closer to eachother, and actually pre-communicate intent to brake giving the effect of negative reaction time. (relative to humans)

mech987987 4y ago

for point #6, the fact that getting kids around town using public transportation is slow, expensive, and difficult makes me wonder if the anti-car people even have families in mind when they advocate for their alternative solutions. The downtown areas that are likely to be workable with no parking in the mid-sized cities I've lived in are already essentially "child-free zones". I think that childless people tend to self-select into the trendy downtown lifestyle, and are more inclined to imagine the world as a playground for young adults.

HEmanZ 4y ago
It’s really weird to me that Americans automatically assume that “soccer mom” suburban lifestyle is just the default way to raise kids. Like it’s normal for kids (children! without jobs!) to need to travel 20 miles per day for their daily activities. Go to any other civilized country and you’ll see children biking or walking to their daily activities, or riding public transport alone (ever heard of a school bus?) if they really need to.
- maerF0x0 4y ago
  The reason it's hard to talk about in isolation and without assuming stereotype personas is because it's truly complex. Part of why Americans travel 20 miles per day is because highways make things "close" in terms of minutes, and because they take up so much space, large roadways can make proximal (distance) things further. Eg if you have to walk 1 mile down a highway to a pedestrian bridge to get to the part that is just across 8 lanes, a 1 minute walk becomes a 40 minute walk. Additionally these roadways rarely are kid safe for things like bicycles. Additionally social stratification and division has made it (seemingly?) less for those kids to travel alone. Additionally 100 other points. I really do think when people choose to drive they're expressing their best known solution to a wide variety of non transportation issues and because they choose it it feeds back on itself democratically and design wise (Design for cars because people choose cars, people choose cars because of the solutions to design for cars)
  - HEmanZ 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

throwaway22032 4y ago

Frankly I think the problem is more like this - 1. Get people to change their lifestyles to the downtown lifestyle in which you don't own a home, you don't do significant DIY / outdoor hobbies etc, you don't often leave a 10ish mile radius of your home except for holidays. Everything in the "fuck cars" movement seems to stem from that. I live in London and the public transport network works fantastically for the "metropolitan lifestyle". But that's not what I want to limit my life to. If push came to shove and I had to decide whether I wanted a house with a garden, kids, hobbies that require transporting relatively large items, etc, I'd sooner move out of the city than give that up. I love clubs, pubs, makerspaces and the high street as much as the next guy but it's pretty easy to just live out of town and get the train in for that.

oldnetguy 4y ago
I think it's even more than that. There is a movement where you should own nothing. You should not have a house, you should live in a city, everything should be shared and paid for with taxes. I was born in NYC and own my own apartment and I am considered a "Gentrifier" because I bought it and do not rent. I like living in a metropolitan area, but I can see why other's don't.
- throwaway22032 4y ago
  Everything has to be done by someone else. You can't work on your own place, you have to employ someone to do that. Where do they live with their work van? I guess they have to be a business(tm) and rent a warehouse. Oh and their van has to be less than 5 years old, otherwise it's too pollutey. They can just buy a new one, that's fine. Etc etc. It'd be funny if it wasn't actually happening. I have had a pretty charmed life and I still find it really hard to understand the weirdly bookish attitude.
  - maerF0x0 4y ago
    > You can't work on your own place, you have to employ someone to do that Part of this is the taxation and GDP-ification of everything. (not saying go back) for example when we traded housewives for house cleaners + hello fresh + fiverr assistants we got a double whammy of GDP growth (+ for the wife going to work, plus for the employees now doing her previously unaccounted work at a profit). And same story with IRS receivables. (again, not saying send women back home, just pointing out the accounting)

OkayPhysicist 4y ago

I reckon 1) could be solved by price discrimination. I would happily pay twice as much for BART if it meant riding in a train car that was only occupied by other people willing to pay twice as much. By tiering service, you still provide transit at all for everybody who needs it at the current price, while meeting more of the demand of people who people who avoid public transit for perceived safety/classism concerns.

OkayPhysicist 4y ago
To expand on this, since it sounds kind of flippant: In the US at the moment, public transit suffers from the fact that in most areas, for most people it's largely optional: you can drive, or you can use public transit. Quite a few people choose to drive, leading to a disproportionate fraction of the people on public transit being people who have no other option, and furthermore the fraction of outright deranged individuals (leaving all their clothes on the platform save for a baseball cap and a syringe tucked behind their ear, for an example I witnessed a few days ago) being over-represented in the public transit riding populace. Overcoming this stigma is important for getting people to use public transit as their primary means of transportation, and working towards making truly car-optional cities.